› added 11 years ago

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TIL Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi lost the tips of two fingers in an industrial accident and was convinced by his factory foreman to continue playing by listening to recordings of famous jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt who only played with two fingers on his fretboard hand.

Q5pp TIL In 1913, a roulette wheel landed on black 26 times in a row. Shortly after, gamblers revisited the wheel to lose millions of francs betting against black, and a statistical fallacy was born.
R7Qxw TIL That the camera company Kodak created the world's first digital camera in 1975 but chose not to produce any digital products for FIFTEEN YEARS, because they were worried that it might eat into their sales of analog film. By that point the market was crowded and they never recovered.
xVVVB TIL that studies showed that economic insecurity causes people to experience a lack of control, which activates psychological processes associated with anxiety and fear. This causes people to be more vulnerable to feeling physical pain, and makes them more likely to rely on painkillers.
n7XW TIL Isaac Newton was elected as a Member of Parliament in 1689 and served for exactly one year. During that time, he said one and only one sentence during the lengthy proceedings: he asked a nearby usher to close an open, drafty window.
GYKEg TIL In 2015, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield released the first ever album recorded entirely in space, named Space Sessions: Songs from a Tin Can.